Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  Before the poet and I could come to blows about this, Delly said, without conviction, ‘Is the strike still on in California? Maybe we shouldn’t be eating Californian grapes. Or South African food.’

  I said we probably needed someone working at the club to ensure that the food eaten was politically, and in all ways, sound.

  I reminded them that elephants sometimes went on salt binges.

  I had noticed that some of my friends used food to recondition themselves: crash diets and health farms. Another search for purity of self. Fasting. The exorcising of demons. A search for holiness. Attempts to use diet to remake themselves and remake the world.

  I suppose if because of the world environmental crisis we have to live one day on synthetic food we would then be sundered from the natural world but at the same time we would be ‘protecting’ the natural world. We, the human species, would then truly be orphans of nature.

  I left the meeting with Delly to go to a good long dinner where we might play the fool, and where we could contemplate the richness and abundance of food which the good world still offers us, thinking to myself that all meals are always a bigger feast than we sometimes realise.

  Reading Detective Fiction.

  I

  Who Writes It?

  I was sick in bed with a torn back ligament (please, no more personal therapies or personal back problem sagas) and I telephoned my friendly bookseller Philip Bray to send over some light reading.

  He quipped that I shouldn’t be lifting anything heavy anyhow. I have since learned that this is a bookseller’s gag.

  He knows that I am a macabre person and recommended the book The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. I hadn’t read any Harris.

  It was macabre beyond my wildest dreams. Better still it was transsexual. It is about a trainee woman FBI agent who is attached to the investigation of a serial murder case where the murderer is skinning female victims. He is making himself a female body stocking from the skins. As you can imagine, there are wonderful dressmaking problems – where to put the zip and so forth. And skin preservation procedures which have to be carefully followed. It was like something I might have written. But that’s not the point. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes the detective fiction sub-genre: mutilation. I agree with a reviewer, Clive Barker, that the book takes us ‘to places in the mind where few writers have the talent or sheer nerve to venture’. The Washington Post makes the appropriately tasteless comment that the book moves ‘seamlessly towards its climax’.

  I rang Philip and asked for more Thomas Harris. He couldn’t supply any but instead sent me two books by detective fiction writer Jonathan Kellerman. Disappointed but with some anticipation of delight, I began reading The Butcher’s Theater, set in Jerusalem. It too is about a serial killer.

  I read detective fiction about once a year (Sara Paretsky is my current favourite) so I am not a buff, but given the subject of the first two books of detection for the year, I noted to myself that serial murder might be a fashion at present among detective fiction writers. As I read on, I thought how ‘seamless’ these writers were, keeping as they do to older conventions of dialogue and description and the conventions of narrative realism (which is why they are so lazily comfortable to read). But I was made curious by coming across the word segue in both the Harris book and the Kellerman. I had to look up the word when I struck it for the first time in The Silence of the Lambs. It is a musical expression meaning to move on without pausing, to proceed without a break into a new movement. Harris used it to describe a conversational gambit. ‘Then you come in with a ham-handed segue into your questionnaire,’ the psychopathic psychiatrist complains to the trainee FBI agent during their interview. She had tried to slide from the introductory chat into a preplanned interview. The doc tor spotted the slide, the segue.

  Lo and behold (I am using expression such as this now; lo means see), I find the word in the Kellerman book too. I also find that because it is about serial murders, it also has references to the FBI’s computer data bank in which the FBI profiles serial killers. The data bank is call VI-CAP or Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Although in Kellerman it is called VICAP without the hyphen.

  From my sick bed I stared out at the glittering bright optimism of Sydney Harbour surprisingly empty for a Saturday, reminding me of Munich airport when it is closed by fog. But something was niggling at the back of my mind.

  I was sipping a long G and T with a slice of lime when in a flash it occurred to me that Kellerman and Harris might be the same author. I looked to the biographical notes. The Harris book had no biographical note.

  Inside the Kellerman book cover, Kellerman was described as clinical associate professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who had received a PhD in clinical psychology from that university.

  No bio on Harris. Curious.

  If they were two different writers maybe they had used the same source. Either an FBI manual or FBI drinking buddy who in turn infected and informed both their stories. Maybe it was the FBI agent who used the word segue. I was alerted then to other minor similarities. The mention of fat clothes, those clothes designed to hide overweight bodies; preoccupations with surgical procedure and cannibalism. The idea of biting as a weapon. Hence in the Harris book Lecter, the psychopathic doctor, is never allowed without a mouthpiece and head guard because once in the prison hospital he had eaten a nurse’s face, eyes and tongue. In the Kellerman book we find a psychopath who, during a fight with a detective, ‘sank his teeth into Daniel’s shoulder. Finding the wound, chewing it, enlarging it.’ In both books there is an interest in transsexuality.

  Both books contain insect analogies, hence the moth chrysalis becoming butterfly as analogy for ugly guy becoming a beautiful transvestite in the Harris book – the idea of imago, that some people have imprinted within them a concealed personality.

  Another narrative mannerism both books use is to give the character’s angry inner thoughts to the reader as they precede a politely modified conversational response.

  In both books I found a few words which I took to be Californian regionalisms – barf for vomit and the expression lame fuck used as a term of abuse; both seemed especially out of place in the Israeli detective jargon of The Butcher’s Theater. I had not heard either term before. Both books had what I call ‘befriended words’, words that authors like and use often. Apart from segue, another example in these books was the word bailiwick.

  Both books share a love of the precise technical term in furniture and other specialisations and like to use the ‘correct’ word where a commonplace word would do and would not draw attention to itself, such as ‘He hefted the weapon’.

  I only became convinced that Harris and Kellerman were the same when I found their psychopaths using the word boring as an expression of reaction to other people or events, extended as b-o-o-o-r-i-ing in the Harris book. In the Kellerman book the psychopath Dr Terrific is always finding ordinary life and its reactions borrring.

  I knew I had a case.

  My first case of literary detection had been to trace a missing quote. This sounded a little bigger.

  Why would a writer working in the same genre use two names? One reason might be that Kellerman (or is Harris the writer’s real name?) is prolific and his publishers do not want to have to handle two books by the same author in one year (both books came out in 1988) or that he wants to have two publishers each unaware of the other. Or he wants to use similar material twice. I stress that the stories in the books are quite different apart from their interest in serial murder and mutilation. If you eliminated some of the author mannerisms and vocabulary overlaps you would need a computer to detect that they were written by the same person.

  Or does the Jewish named Jonathan Kellerman want a WASP alter ego or vice versa?

  I decided to retrace my steps.

  My first call was to my bookseller Philip Bray. Was he having an elaborate joke wit
h me? Another bookseller’s gag? Was he testing my literary perception? I had asked for Thomas Harris and he’d given me Kellerman. Let’s see if I can tell that I’m reading the same writer.

  Not to be caught out in a bookseller gag and so become a funny item in Bookseller and Publisher, I thought I had better check with my literary adviser, Doctor Anderson. He is a raunchy and courteous man and for a heavy man he is light on his feet. He said he didn’t know but before I talked with Philip he would contact our rare books broker and modern fiction expert, Nicholas Pounder. Nicholas said he could ‘shed no light whatsoever on the mystery’.

  Philip was ‘out at lunch’, an assistant told me over the telephone. I had never heard of a bookseller having lunch. They usually wait and eat at a book launch. Maybe she said out at a launch.

  I eventually got Philip on the telephone. I must have displayed the impatience of a cripple confined to bed and limited to the telephone for contact with the outside world.

  I was cautious. I said that it was clever of him to give Kellerman in place of Harris given that their style was ‘identical’.

  Philip was quick-footed. He had chosen them for me because of my interest in mutilation and the macabre. He was happy he could be of service.

  He seemed ‘genuinely surprised’ when I sprung on him that I suspected they were the same writer. He claimed to be impressed by my hypothesis and claimed ‘not to know’.

  He complained that I had a way of making questions sound like accusations.

  My next call was to Professor Stephen Knight, University of Melbourne, leading specialist in detective fiction, to see if the Kellerman/Harris identity question was generally known in the business.

  Stephen Knight said that sometimes when reading a batch of detective fiction books for review their sameness causes him to begin to think that all detective fiction is written by the same author.

  Stephen Knight said that he knew their (his) work but was not aware of them being the same person: He would however have his associate, Lucy Sussex, check. She possessed a dictionary of pseudonyms. That such a book existed seemed remarkable.

  I was to have a number of calls to Stephen about the question, during which he promoted his recently published anthology of Australian detective fiction Dead Witness, a collection of the best Australian mystery stories, urging me to read stories in the book and trying to have his book puffed in this story.

  He and his associate’s research showed up zero.

  I talked to a consultant psychiatrist about the case. He was far from happy. You say your bookseller chooses these books for you. This mutilation and transsexual material?

  Yes.

  Do you usually have your reading chosen by others?

  A good question.

  No, not strictly.

  If he chooses this stuff for you it means he has a certain image of you. Is this the image you have of yourself? So you end up on your back in bed with these books. You suspect there is only one author? Maybe you and this Professor Knife suspect …

  … Knight. Professor Knight, not knife. I’m supposed to make the Freudian slips, not him.

  You suspect there is only one author to all books and we are that author? Or do you suspect that you wrote all books.

  Yes.

  In these transsexual mutilation novels you have a search for gender identity. In the preoccupation with authorship of the two books, you have suspicions that there is only one author. That in terms of authorship you are being deceived? Are we talking about self-ship here? About deception and detection of self?

  I see what he is getting at but that is not the first question. At this point I am out to find if Harris is Kellerman.

  Maybe Kellerman is the alias – Killer man?

  If confronted, would Kellerman/Harris deny it? Should I phrase the question so that he would reveal himself anyhow?

  How then to question Kellerman? I would say I was writing a piece on his work as one writer in homage to another.

  I would ask a few general questions and then casually segue into his use of Thomas Harris pseudonym.

  Questions for Kellerman. Is he Harris? If not, how does he explain the similarities? Does he know Harris? If he is Harris, is this widely known?

  Why did he create Harris? Some writers have different names for their work in different genres. Julian Barnes is Dan Kavanagh (the pseudonym being taken from his wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh). Rosemary Creswell uses the name Ruth Clarement for her detective fiction and her own name for her other work. But the Kellerman/Harris books were in the same genre and same sub-genre.

  How did he choose the name Harris?

  I rang the University of Southern California but a recorded voice said, ‘You have reached the University of Southern California. If you are calling from a pushbutton phone please select the appropriate office from this menu of options. You may do this during this call otherwise you will be transferred to a campus operator when one becomes available.’ The voice then went through a menu of options in which I eventually became lost, trance-like, and was transferred to the switchboard.

  From the switch I was transferred through a labyrinth of numbers but the outcome was that they did not know any Professor Kellerman at the university switch, or at the medical school, nor at pediatrics.

  Very odd.

  I fax a vice-president of Bantam Books in New York using personal contacts in the publishing world to get Kellerman/Harris’s secret number.

  It was good-cop-bad-cop time.

  II

  Jonathan Kellerman: the Record of the Interview

  Having gathered convincing evidence that best-selling crime writers Jonathan Kellerman and Thomas Harris were the same person, I decided to confront Kellerman and establish the truth once and for all.

  It has been suggested by people at the club that because I conceived the theory that both authors were identical while bedridden and in acute pain, under the influence of digesics, brufen, and G and Ts with slices of lime, that maybe it was all the ramblings of an unhappy, feverish mind. Bibliophile and Leading Sydney Reader Nicholas Pounder said that he had analysed both writers and that Harris was syntactically superior to Kellerman. He was certain they could not be the same writer.

  We shall see.

  Having failed to find any Kellerman working at the University of Southern California where his biographical note says he worked, the club secretary contacted Stephen Rubin of Bantam Books, New York, for Kellerman’s telephone number.

  The following fax came back illustrating the strange nature of these Americans.

  It read: ‘I’m delighted to hear that your wonderful client wants to interview the wonderful Jonathan Kellerman. The best way to get the ball moving [this is an American expression, I gather, which means ‘to make things happen’] is to contact his agent Barney Karpfinger … Like all the rest of us, he too is terrific …’

  What sort of goddamn fax-talk is that?!

  The club secretary contacted Barney Karpfinger and received another fax which read: ‘Jonathan Kellerman would be happy to talk to your client [then followed his address and telephone number]. The only thing for your client to keep in mind is that the Kellermans are observant Jews and not able to take phone calls from sundown Friday through sundown Saturday.’

  I worried myself sick about this – that is, even sicker than I was. If I called on Friday Australian time I would reach Kellerman on Thursday but he would be breaching the Australian Jewish Sabbath. Jews doing business across the international date line run the risk of breaching two Sabbaths.

  I decided not to raise this with Barney Karpfinger. I had enough on my plate.

  Before confronting Kellerman/Harris I read all of ‘their’ works.

  By the way, to complicate the matter it seems that Kellerman’s wife, Faye, also writes crime fiction.

  Faye Kellerman’s book Ritual Bath (Karpfinger’s fax talks of ‘the Kellermans’ so I take it that Faye is not another alias – although I detected a preoccupation with t
ranssexualism in Jonathan Kellerman’s work, remember) has this dedication: ‘And for the munchkins: Jesse, Rachel, and Ilana’.

  In Harris’s book Red Dragon one of the characters says, ‘My father smiling at Mrs Jacobi and all the little Munchkins.’ Does everyone call their children munchkins over there? Suspicious.

  In Harris’s book there is reference to a criminal being a ‘secretor’, someone who leaves a deposit of bodily fluid at the crime scene. Likewise in both Jonathan and Faye Kellerman’s books the word secretor is used. I would assume that Faye and Jonathan Kellerman would have these words in their mutual vocabularies and I treat them as having a common vocabulary – after eighteen years of marriage. I am putting aside the question of whether there is a ‘Kellerman marriage’.

  In Kellerman’s The Butcher’s Theater the serial killer communicates to the police using biblical quotations.

  In Harris’s Red Dragon the serial killer uses the bible as a code.

  In Harris’s other two books there is no biography of the writer but I came across one in Red Dragon – which oddly, against the conventions of publishing, is buried at the back of the book:

  Thomas Harris was a veteran newsman when he wrote his first novel Black Sunday in 1973. He covered crime in the United States and Mexico and was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in New York City. He is a native of Mississippi.

  The cataloguing data has Harris born in 1940. He would now be fifty and would have been thirty-three when he is described as being ‘a veteran newsman’.

  It seemed to me that the publisher lacked conviction about this biography. This is a very vague bio.

  I arranged it so that I called Kellerman when it wasn’t Friday either in LA or here to avoid offence.

  It was tough question time.

  I was very cunning in my approach and talked generally before coming to the point.

  For Kellerman fans I will give an account of the interview.